


loaves and fishes and life everlasting

by WolffyLuna



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (both implied and 'Mary Keay is canonically abusive'), Atheism, Character Study, Child Abuse, Christianity, Gen, Religion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:55:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolffyLuna/pseuds/WolffyLuna
Summary: Have you ever tried to pretend to be productive so hard you join a religion, leave it, and then end up awkwardly straddling belief and disbelief?Or: Gerard Keay's journey through Christianity, alienation, wanting things that may or may not exist, and implausible and confusing bullshit.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Anglicanism, Gerard Keay & Christianity, Gerard Keay & God, Gerard Keay & Mary Keay
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: Iddy Iddy Bang Bang! 2020





	1. go fish yourself

Gerard walked through the frosty London streets, regretting only wearing a t-shirt. It was cold, he was covered in goosebumps, and the only spots of warmth were the crooks of his elbows.

The crossed arms and general air of deep frustration and resentment increased the Looks he got from the other pedestrians. He knew the Look well: “Oh no, there is a Feral Teenager on the loose, better make sure our ‘only one schoolchild at a time’ signs are extra shiny, and stare at him to make sure he doesn’t cause any trouble.” It was annoying, but it wasn’t like he could be any more annoyed, so it looped around to being almost freeing. _Yeah, I’m spiky and dyed and threatening, and what are you gonna do about it? You better watch out, I might teach your kids The Drugs._

He was cold, he was tired because it was too goddamned early in the morning, he was frustrated—and a little scared. Okay: terrified. He’d fled out of his house half dressed, and now he had to work out how to fill in the time till he could go back in.

This morning, Mary had breezily got set up for a visit from one of her clients, Mr Reid. She hadn’t thought to have mentioned it earlier, why would she need to inform _Gerard_ , and only begrudgingly said he was coming as she started rearranging the trip hazards in the reception room.

If Mary Keay asked him to describe Mr. Reid, this is the answer she would want: He was a buyer of esoteric— _actually_ esoteric—books. He was small time, as these things go, and his interests were niche, but he was a loyal customer of Pinhole Books. All the more loyal because the Keays knew what he liked. He liked plays. He liked books of the Stranger, and occasionally of the Hunt, if one was feeling Smirkeian, but the man himself despised Smirke. Despised labels in general. But he knew what he wanted.

If Gerard was to describe him the way he’d want to describe him: Deeply off-putting. He always talked like a character in an art-house play, or a particularly dense novel. There was nothing technically wrong with the way he talked, but he always declaimed, and everything he said had the air of being arranged and rehearsed, even if there was no way it was. But that was merely off-putting, and he could deal with off-putting.

He liked to stand a centimetre too far into your personal space. If you backed away, he would follow right back to where you were, and you could end up going on a low speed, awkward chase around the room. It was only awkward, only a social slip up, and you could _always_ run away—But Gerard knew that he was being chased, and the slow speed didn’t make it less threatening. It only drew it out.

Recently he had escalated to ‘avuncular’ shoulder pats that made Gerard intensely aware of the metaphorical bullseye on his back.

His mother either hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care, and he’d put money on the second one.

So, he wasn’t going to be sticking around this morning if he could help it.

Mary hadn’t seemed to notice him leaving. She’d notice he was gone when Mr. Reid arrived, and there may be consequences—but the fact he could rattle off all the important facts about him, and list the books he’d be the best buyer for gave him some protection. He could say he’d learned all he had to here, she could count him as appropriately educated about the guy and they could move on.

But he’d have even more protection if he could claim he was doing something productive.

Rain started to fall, cold and lazy.

Gerry ducked under an awning. He fiddled with the battered cigarette carton in his pocket, wondering if he could justify using up some of his limited supply.

He looked across the road, at the cramped line of cars dropping people off, at the people walking in formal-ish clothes, towards a building with a bright shiny metal sign of “St Mark’s Church.”

Now, _there_ was an opportunity to claim to be productive.

He wouldn’t say he knew much about any religion. He knew some of the little codes they knew to describe the fears. He knew that some of them worshipped the fears, even if they hid behind the worship of something else to do it. He knew that some religions really liked books. And he knew that sometimes these interests converged, that there was a middle part to that Venn diagram.

He could head in, get out from under the awning and the rain and the glares of the newsagent convinced he was going to go on a magazine stealing spree, and go to where there were people who were presumably not Mr Reid, _and_ claim he was doing client base research. Was it a brilliant and well thought out plan? No, of course not. He’d stick out like a sore thumb. And he knew that most churches _probably_ weren’t cults, or that interested in Leitners, and just did generic... religion-y stuff. Whatever that was

But was it a plan? Hell yes.

He ducked across the road, and ran up the paved path towards the doors. It was a plain brick building, with a sharp spire with a cross on top. A few other newer buildings sat near it, like dependent organism.

He got on in, and savoured the feeling of not being rained on.

An old woman in a cardigan stopped him at the door, appraising him. “You look like you’re new here,” she said, with a smile of forced politeness.

He ineffectually wiped the rain off his trousers. “Maybe.”

The smile got crisper, and she handed him a stack of hardback books, and cheaply printed, unstapled brochure.

The interior was relatively plain, nothing like the ornate churches he’d read about. It had colourless windows, bucket chairs, and a totally unremarkable wooden cross thing. No dead or dying people on it. He’d expected some carved dead people. He’d heard something about the carved dead guy (who, if things had gone a bit wrong and/or supernatural, would be bleeding and screaming) being important to the whole thing, maybe it wasn’t? It wasn’t like he was an expert.

In general, it wasn’t what he expected—but he wasn’t quite sure what he _did_ expect. Oppressive darkness? Blood stains? A general air of menace? It was just... normal. A bit weirdly proportioned, with a ceiling too tall for how narrow it was, and the wooden benches took up more space than they should have, but it was relatively ordinary.

At the head was a stage with a lectern and a table draped with white cloth, with a box hidden under a white cloth on top.

It was an unusual building, sure, but it wasn’t a palace to the majesty of the fears or anything. It was an ordinary kind of odd.

He went to the bench farthest at the back, and thus nearest the door, and wedged himself into the corner, so he could see the as much of the building as possible with just a turn of his head.

Speckles of pink and orange light from stained glass rested underneath the cross, and slowly drifted up with the movement of the sun behind the clouds.

More people filed in. Families mostly, with a few lone older people. The standard of dress remained high. And conventional. He stuck out like a sore thumb. (But if he didn’t want to stick out, he wouldn’t have dressed like that. So.) Got his fair share or looks, from disappointment, to concern, to confused and surprised.

Two people in robes came down the aisle, and bowed toward the stage before stepping up onto it. One was older, male, middle aged, confident in the way of someone who had done this a hundred times before. The other was younger, and confident too, but in a much more ‘showtime!’ way.

The priest, he would guess.

He took a deep breath. Here goes nothing. If it all went well, he’d pick up some contacts, and get to keep his internal organs *and* his sanity. Win-win.

The older one stepped forward. “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

The rest of the church intoned as one, in the bored and resonant sound of fifty people speaking together. “And blessed be his Kingdom, now and forever. Amen.”

How did they know how to say that? He had a feeling like he had stepped into cold water, that he’d overreached, and that there was something puppeting this along that he hadn’t foreseen—before he realised that they were all looking at the pamphlet. He dropped the books with an embarrassingly loud thump and fumbled the pamphlet open.

The pamphlet listed what the priest would be say, what he would be saying, all in a nice neat order. It was also written in an incomprehensible code. But he bet it would be neat and tidy if he could read that code.

The older priest smiled. “Now, starting with Hymn 73: My God, I Love Thee.”

An electronic keyboard started playing the first few bars, and the congregation opened one of the books.

Gerard opened one of the ones he had been given, found that it contained precisely zero sheet music, and fumbled open the second one in a rush as everyone else started signing. He didn’t want to stick out too much.

The song was slow and the melody was simple. It seemed to be “you should love this guy called Jesus, because he got stabbed for you, and isn’t that very loving?” Which, uh. Had implications. And gave him fodder for the claim that he was being productive. Abnegation combined with stabbing had a _history_.

The song finished, and the older priest started reading from a hard-backed book so large that it filled the lectern it sat on. It didn’t look old from where he was sitting, more faux old. And when the priest read from it, there wasn’t that ‘catch’ you felt when someone read from a Leitner. (Which was probably for the best. Having a Leitner read at you in a crowded space while you were unprepared wasn’t exactly good for your health. Even if it was evidence that these people wouldn’t be in Pinhole’s target demographic.)

The older priest read—something about fishermen? It was hard to follow, even with the text written in the little pamphlet. He’d started in the middle of something in that tome, and it didn’t make that much sense out of context. Stabbed guy helped some people fish, and then instructed them to fish for people? He had the image of these people running around a high street, throwing nets over people willy-nilly. Probably not the right image, but it was amusing.

The service continued on, alternating singing and reading. Major themes: The Lord Loves Us; Jesus Is Dead But Now He Is Not, Yay (Which was, uh, Concerning. Maybe. Considering the way dead people tended to come back); Treating People Well Is A Good Thing; Someone Called Isaiah Wrote Some Things That Are Even Harder To Follow Than The Rest of It.

He was terminally lost, but he was going to stick through it in the hopes of gaining more understanding. Also, it gave him an excuse to stay out of the house until Mr Reid was gone.

Partway through one of the songs, the younger priest popped up right next to him, with the rest of the congregation’s teenagers in a loose bunch. He smiled, and gestured at him to follow.

Which, uh, no, he knew about second locations. Not going to follow him, not even if he promised a candy coated Leitner (...especially if he offered a candy coated Leitner. What even would that be.) Not unless he knew _exactly_ where they were going. And even then, that’d be dicey. Going to second locations was for people with a death wish/

Apparently, this showed on his face.

The younger priest pulled back, with the expression of someone who’d just tried to pat a fluffy dog to find that it growled as soon as you reached down.

The pack of teenagers following him looked varyingly confused, as he led them away from the glaring metalhead.

The older priest started speaking, as if he hadn’t noticed anything going on at the back. He spoke slowly and temperately about an anecdote of a husband and wife, and slowly tied it in to what they had read about. It was—it wasn’t any more or less confusing than the readings themselves, and he still couldn’t completely follow it. While the readings had been being dumped in partway through a book that everyone else knew, this speech used a whole language of metaphor he had never heard before. He tried to follow, keeping notes of each word he didn’t know and trying to pick it apart from context, trying to look at each simile from every angle. It was exhausting. He couldn’t tell if he had learned anything or he hadn’t.

The priest ended his speech with a smile, and as if on cue, everyone turned the page of the pamphlet. They spoke as one “I believe in one God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible...”

He read along with them, so as not to stand out, voice hidden in the din. But he kept his fingers crossed in his pocket. A childish habit, one that had very little actual protection in it—but not none. Childish habits sometimes formed for a reason. And this was not something he would want to read out sincerely without knowing exactly what he was reading out.

More prayers were read by them all. Pleas for mercy for themselves, for others, for the world. Maybe concerning, maybe not. Sensible, either way. Either this was a fear cult, in which case pleas for mercy made perfect sense, or it was not—and well, considering how the world was, pleas for mercy still made .

“The peace of the Lord be with you,” said the oldest priest, as the disappeared teenagers filed back in.

“And also with you,” intoned the congregation.

At once, everyone scattered, and started... shaking each other’s hands and murmuring?

Sure, why not. Made as much sense as anything else that had happened.

He tucked himself further into the corner, but even then he couldn’t escape the hand shake obsessed crowd.

The younger priest came up to him, and gingerly reached out his hand, inching closer and closer until Gerard finally took it and shook it.

Grannies, middle aged men in suits a size too small, they all came up to shake his hand and wish him peace. Which was technically pleasant, in a saccharine way, but also disturbing. These other wise sensible people became non stop handshake seeking missiles, with a façade of chipper friendliness.

(Still better than Mr Reid. Far better. After getting their handshake, _they left_.)

Everyone returned to their original seats.

Gerard could just about see the older priest doing something on the stage, but he was too far away to see it clearly.

As this was happening, the young lead the congregation in prayer. “ _Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven...”_

These lofty words dissolved into something about bread and trespassing. Which was certainly a set of priorities.

The older priest held some white circles aloft. “Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup--” (More bread!)

 _“We_ proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes,” intoned the crowd.

So either god was dead, was dead _and_ stabbed guy, and also coming back at some point? Or something?

 **“** Draw near with faith; Receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he gave for you, and his blood which he shed for you. Eat and drink in remembrance that he died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.”

 _...what?_ The white circles looked—not like they were made of human flesh, but who knew what was in the cups? Not him, and not from this distance.

It was maybe metaphor? Maybe not. Either he should be fleeing right now, or rejoicing in finding potential customers. Mostly he suppressed his startled laughter, as people filed towards the stage and the waiting cups of maybe-blood.

And no one seemed to be trying to grab him and get him to drink and eat, like they had with the hand shaking. That was polite of them. (Rule number one of etiquette: don’t force people into cannibalism. That’s just basic politeness)

It was relaxed and orderly probably-cannibalism. Everyone queued quietly before drinking the maybe-blood-maybe-wine as the priests murmured something over their heads. Very British: queuing while being cannibals.

Of course, there was a good chance it was just wine. A good chance he was jumping at shadows. But shadows did have a nasty habit of eating people if you were unlucky—so.

He spent the rest of the service trying to play the odds on ‘cannibalism or not cannibalism’ and ‘okay, exactly _how_ many gods are we talking here, and how many of them are the same person’ as more prayers and announcements happened in the background.

The older priest opened his arms. “Go in peace, to love and serve the lord.”

Ah, more ‘service’ and ‘lordship.’ He was detecting a theme here. _Joy._

“In the name of Christ, Amen.”

The older priest walked down the aisle purposefully, followed by the younger one. The rest of the church filed after them, row after row, towards the lobby. Gerard followed them, ready to run if the cannibalism got more overt and there was a roast person with an apple in their mouth out there, or something.

The congregation milled around a cheap folding table with a plasticky table cloth on it. A hot water boiler bubbled away, with a selection of cups and instant coffee and PG Tips next to it.

A small child snuck up to the table, smiling secretively, and nicked a jam n’ cream. Other people, who were not six, less secretively grabbed miniature cakes and cream biscuits that were piled on the table.

Gerry sidled up to it. He hadn’t had breakfast, he was too busy fleeing the house, and he hadn’t really noticed he was hungry until there was cake in front of him. And it seemed free for the taking.

The cream biscuits were still in their originally packaging, the printed plastic wrap folded up under the tray. They could have adulterated the biscuits after unwrapping them, but it would have been more effort than it was worth. Especially if they were as _open_ about their possible-human eating as they looked. Which they probably weren’t even doing. He was aware of the existence of metaphors, thank you very much.

But either way, it was probably safe. He grabbed a biscuit, and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Oh, hello there.”

He tried not to visibly jump, and spun around to face the older priest.

He held out a hand to shake. “I’m Mr Smith. You are?”

Nope, not shaking hands again. He was done with that. He’d had his fill for today. “Jefhard,” he mumbled around a mouth full of biscuit.

Mr Smith Observed the lack of handshakery, bur at least didn’t comment on it. “Did you come with your parents?”

Gerard swallowed. “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine. Tit for tat.”

He smiled. “Answering questions is part of my job.”

“The—stuff--- in the cup: it’s not actually blood, is it?”

He was taken aback, and laughed with surprised. “Oh, Heavens no! Well, not unless you’re Catholic.”

That wasn’t an answer he completely understood, but he’d take it. Just metaphorical blood, no literal cannibalism: good for his life expectancy, maybe not good for his chances of finding clientele.

Mr Smith thought for a second about what question to ask. “Did you enjoy the service?”

“I thought you were going to ask about my parents.”

He shrugged. “You seem to have got here on your own well enough, I don’t see any reason to ask,” he lied. “Whether you enjoyed it is a better question.”

“It was—confusing,” he evaded.

“First time?”

“Yeah,” he said, all pretense of tit for tat gone.

This time he looked a little more concerned.

And Gerard so no reason to make him less concerned. He grabbed another biscuit. “And if you are desperately curious about my parents: no, they didn’t come with me. My mother is cool with it—” or she should be, if he had calculated the risks right, “—and my dad’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, with the expression of someone who had blundered into a conversational landmine and was regretting it.

Gerard smiled to himself. He did ask! Ask stupid questions, get answers you don’t want. “It’s fine. He died when I was pretty young, just a toddler.” That almost always got reactions from ‘mundanes’.

And it did this time too. Mr Smith’s eyes darted, looking for an escape route. “Well, it was nice meeting you. I do hope you come again—maybe it’ll get less confusing over time, eh?” He marched off in the direction of the young family with the sneaky six-year-old.

Gerard took a cake for the road, and headed back home, rehearsing his explanation for where he had gone and why it was totally legitimate and justifiable.

* * *

Mary didn’t even comment on him being gone, or ask for an explanation. He wasn’t even sure she _noticed_. Which was on balance a good thing, even if it was frustrating to have gone to all that effort for nothing.

Well, maybe not nothing. They could still be customers. And he was... curious. He’d seen a glimpse of another system of metaphor, another way of seeing the world, and he wanted to know _more_.

During the week, in a sliver of library time stolen around the research Mary got him to do, he researched Catholicism, namely the question: they’re not actual cannibals, right? He researched it, and immediately got lost in the theological weeds. It was probably not cannibalism, the wine was at one point actual wine, but he was sure there was some Catholic priest somewhere that if they heard what he thought, would go “No, no, no, actually what happens—” But the amount of cannibalism was low, and the likelihood of selling Leitners, either to the Anglicans he knew the location of or the Catholics he’d have to find, was less comfortingly low.

But he kept reading. Learned about the actual number of Gods involved (three and one, simultaneously), some of the basic shape of the mythos, the basic shape of the beliefs as they were stated.

Mary did not travel that next weekend. She stayed in, and had no particular use for him, unless he decided to dust the shelves in a fit of boredom.

There was no point in going back to St Mark’s. There was nothing he would achieve by doing it. No customers to lure, nothing ‘useful’ he could learn.

But he went anyway.

The usher recognised him (and seemed slightly surprised he showed up again), and he knew what he was doing with the paper they ladened him down with. He knew to read from the pamphlet unless they were singing, when he should read from the red book (though the green book’s purpose was still obscure.)

He was still more or less lost during the service, but he had a structure to cling onto this time. Knew what some of the repeated words ( _Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, have mercy on us--),_ even if he did not understand the full meaning. The readings were about right conduct, non-standard use of the word ‘neighbour’, and people getting beaten up. But at least he knew to expect the readings, knew they were readings from the Bible and that that was the holy book.

And this time, when the younger priest came to collect him along with the other teenagers—he followed him. Because why not? It seemed unlikely to lead into danger, or at least, unlikely to lead to any danger he couldn’t get himself out of.

“I see you decided to join us this time!” the younger priest said to him.

Gerry gave him a look. He was aiming for ‘if you _want_ this to keeping happening, why did you comment on it?’ but from the way the younger priest flinched backwards, he seemed to have missed slightly.

“Call me Steven,” he said, in attempt to save face and also seem hip and cool and not like one of those fuddy-duddies with _last names_.

“Gerard.” 

They went into a side building of the Church, that had an air of a pre-fab building that was being used for a wildly different purpose than whatever the designers had intended. One of the walls had a crude mural of happy cartoon sheep gambolling under a rainbow, and a man with an uncanny face watching over them. (There were Stranger avatars who would kill—literally—for a face like that. The smile was so off-putting, it wrapped round to be being almost beautiful.)

As one, the group raced over to a water boiler with a tap, and the plastic packets and paper cups sitting underneath it. Gerard joined the back of the queue, keeping one eye on the Worrying Bearded Shepherd Dude.

One of the girls spotted him looking. “Yeah, that Jesus always gives me the creeps.”

That was meant to be Jesus? “He looks pretty good for a dead guy, then.”

The crowd slowly dispersed, holding steaming cups, and arranged themselves on the cushions on the floor.

Gerard finally got to the drink station. The packets were those instant hot chocolate packets, the ones that proclaimed they’d make good hot chocolate, just add water!™, and no milk needed. It was blatant false advertising, and he was surprised Ofcom hadn’t come and glared at them for it.

But he made himself one anyway, taking a sip as he flopped down on the cushion that had seen better days. It was a crappy drink—but in a nice way?

Steven took in a deep breath to silence the chatter. “Now, I know we have done the Good Samaritan a thousand times,”

“—More like a million times--”

“—But it’s still worthwhile. It’s good for your spiritual development to go back over old things, read ‘em fresh with your new understanding. So, what do you think it’s about?”

“It’s about how Everyone Is Your Neighbour,” someone said in a bored and sleepy tone.

Which, uh, didn’t seem to be the message, as far as Gerard could see? On account of the priest and the other one being not neighbours? But the other teenager said it in the tone of a Right Answer, the answer that was correct even if it wasn’t in the text.

He’d been in that rodeo before.

“Yes, but is there anything else?” Steven asked.

There was a pause as everyone tried desperately to not be the one who had to answer.

Someone broke the silence. Quiet-voiced, glasses, she was almost the platonic ideal of a shy nerdy kid. “It’s about how you should act to be a good neighbour. It’s not just that everyone is your neighbour, it’s how you should act to everyone.”

Steven smiled and nodded—and still waited for someone else to say something.

Gerard stayed out of the conversation, tried to pick up the context he was missing from what people were saying. Everyone was your neighbour, you should treat your neighbour as yourself (everyone unintentionally echoed the prayer, no matter how hard they tried to phrase it in their own words), everyone meant Everyone.

Slowly, he realised that Steven wasn’t going to stop until everyone had said something, even him.

There was a pregnant pause, and he had to fill it. “There’s a thing—” he stopped, tried to shape the phrase into something that would sound right. Something that would sound like he had half a clue what he was talking about. “It’s not just that you should treat everyone well. It’s also about how you can’t trust the people who should treat you well to do so, but you also can’t trust that the people who ‘shouldn’t’ won’t.”

“That’s... that’s something you could take away from that parable,” Steven said. He clapped his hands on his knees. “Well, we should have escaped from the sermon now. Let’s go.”

Everyone peeled themselves off the cushions, threw their cups in the bin, and headed back.

Steven moved to put his hand on Gerard’s shoulder, but thought better of it, leaving it hovering two inches above. “You’ve had your first communion, Gerard?”

He raised an eyebrow. “First communion?” 

The smile got wider but more fragile, gained an air of ‘how does this child not know _that_?’ “How about you hang back then. We can get it sorted later.”


	2. playing poker with Pascal

Gerard made a habit of going to church when he could, when he wasn’t travelling somewhere else. He kept going to the youth group, and slowly learned people’s names. Shy shy Rebecca who seemed to read Mark for fun, Daniel who like to act like he would rather be anywhere else despite the fact he kept showing up, fashionable and sociable Emma, checked out Tom--- He did his best to talk to them, but it was difficult. They had such normal problems, such normal interests, that he stuck out like a sore thumb that didn’t speak the language. It was... interesting seeing how the other side lived, the people who neither hung about the supernatural or strangely relaxed about underage drinking metal clubs. They made an attempt to be welcoming, at least, and he wasn’t going to throw it in their faces, but it was—hard. 

Both priests kept checking up with him, making sure he was alright, and wasn’t going to explode in a shower of centipedes. Metaphorical centipedes. Mr Smith aimed for being a kindly grandpa about it, Stephen aimed for bouncy and sounded like he was trying to sell something. Neither was as subtle as they thought they were being.

Gerard kept going to the youth group and the services. Kept going even as he saw the gap between him and _them,_ both the youth group and the whole church, more and more clearly. Kept going as ‘and then I will get a Leitner’ became more and more ludicrous.

At first, he thought he did it because, hey, it was a way to spend a Sunday morning. But it was something more than that. Even he had to spot that eventually. For an hour a week, he got told that he was lovable, unconditionally, and all he had to do was believe. (And not even that, you got the love for free—but you got less “Oh dear, don’t do that” love if you believed.) Believe and obey, but mostly believe. Follow two instructions, and you’re most of the way to a good person. And if you’re a good person and believe, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The Kingdom to come ( _thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven_ ), Heaven, the final reward. Something that made this shitty Earth and shitty life worth it. Love, and the promise of something good after all this bullshit.

He would say he didn’t believe. That is was silly and naïve and he knew better—and later he would say that and it would be true.

But right now? He wanted it _so bad_. 

He believed.

* * *

Dan sidled up to Gerard, hot chocolate in one hand and jaffa cake in the other. “So—” he said, with the tone halfway between ‘just making conversation’ and legitimately curious. “We don’t see you around that often—or that regularly, or—you know what I mean.”

“My family travels a lot.” It was both true, and an answer that didn’t freak people out.

Daniel nodded very seriously. “Ah, international superspies. Got it.”

Gerard raised an eyebrow.

Emma jumped in. “No, no, obviously he’s going around uncharted rainforests, finding ancient temples and retrieving mystic treasures.”

“How can it be uncharted and have treasures? Someone would have had to put them there,” Gerard said.

Rebecca tried to force her way into the edge of the conversation, but was soft spoken enough she was almost immediately barrelled over. “I mean, people could live there without making maps—”

“I got it,” Dan said. “International rainforest superspy.”

“You got me. My family makes sure the sloths don’t try and steal the Trident codes.” Gerard sipped his hot chocolate. “And if I said any more, I’d have to kill you.”

* * *

“And Mrs Walsh is a complete b—lovely person who I am finding frustrating, but I swear to G-- Googly Eyes if she gives me one more make up maths assignment--” Dan said.

“I know, right? She’s the worst,” Emma said.

The conversation rattled to a halt.

Emma paused, and realised now one was going to fill the silence, and that Gerard hadn’t said anything recently. “Hey, Gerard, where do you go to school? I haven’t seen you around.”

“I’m home-schooled.”

“Wow, wouldn’t that be, like, super lonely?”

Gerry shrugged, and bit back a joke about the Lukases that would sail over their heads. “Sometimes, but it’s not too bad. I only have to do financial maths.”

“ _LUCKY_ ,” said Dan.

“Noo, he isn’t,” Tom said. “My dad makes me do it? Says that school won’t teach me it, and I have to learn it to Follow in the Family Footsteps—” he made his voice deeper, doing an impression of his father. “So, extra maths. Woohoo.”

“Are you sure we’re not related?”

“Your mum’s an accountant?”

“No, she’s just—like that. About everything.” It felt dangerous mentioning her, like she’d somehow find out. But even if she did, what could she complain about? She had strong feelings about financial math, and Leitners, and what a proper education for someone studying the supernatural should be. (Which involved financial math.)

“What does your mother even do?” Emma asked, looking confused as she tried to rack her brain for memories of him mentioning it.

“She’s a bookseller.”

“...and that requires home-schooling?”

He shrugged “Apparently.”

Rebecca stood nearby, mug clutched tight, watching.

* * *

In theory, Gerard liked the youth group. And originally, he had? But now—well, they were lovely but difficult.

It wasn’t anything that had changed about them. Nothing actually had. It was more that _he_ changed, and the group stayed the same. (Sure, the rest of the group was going on individual journeys of personal growth, no doubt about it, but the group dynamics never changed.) Dan was the life of the metaphorical party, Emma tried make everyone get along, Rebecca was heard but not seen--

And they were always welcoming. They tried so hard at it. But they never _stopped_. He never stopped being welcomed and started belonging. And it wasn’t their fault. He actually didn’t belong, and them just trying harder wouldn’t make him. But that ever-welcoming stopped being—well, welcoming and became alienating. He’d always be accepted, but never belong. Never be like them. Couldn’t be like them. They were normal, and he was weird, and that wasn’t going to change. They were only going to get normal-er, and he was going to end up deeper in that other world.

...And apart from them, the shininess of the love and forgiveness and Heaven wore off. And he learned. Learned enough to start seeing what was underneath.

* * *

“One of Mary’s most important traits is obedience. She was given a duty by God, and she did it. Even if it was hard. And it was so hard. You’re all a bit young to get it, but when you have kids—” Steven smiled in a way that was meant to be personal and relatable and made Gerry want to stab him with a fork. “Looking after them, and then outliving them? It’s hard, but Mary accepted it and did that and that’s why God chose her. She was obedient and faithful.”

* * *

“’With all your soul and all your mind’ is a lot. I know that, and you know that,” Steven said. “And a lot of people don’t make it. Most, probably. But God calls us to try, and so we do so. And if we fail—well, that’s what’s forgiveness is for. God knows we won’t always succeed, and he loves us and forgives us for our failures. Even if it’s for something so important.”

* * *

The youth group smiled and nodded at these lectures.

Gerard tried to not visibly seethe.

Duty, obedience, and no escape from it. Honour your mother and father. Read the good book and follow its lessons. Virtue in obedience that stuck in his craw and boiled in his stomach until he wanted to jump on a table, through all the bibles across the room and shout ‘No! No obedience! I’m done with doing what I’m told! Fuck anyone who tries! Why can’t I do what _I_ want? Not what someone else does!”

He never did, of course. Because that would be immature and childish and as soon as the screaming stopped, they’d just smile and say God would forgive him his faults.

And that was worse. Not the forgiveness, but the saccharine smile that went with it. The ‘God holds us to high standards, but he accepts us when we fail.”

No.

Fuck that. Fuck the impossible goals. Even if forgiveness came with it, it wasn’t fair to set people up for failure like that. Being forgiven for it was better than what Mary—his mother, not Jesus’—did, but it didn’t make it _kind_. Didn’t make it loving. Loving wasn’t setting someone up for failure so you could feel oh so high and mighty about forgiving them afterwards.

Which wasn’t what God was doing. Of course. _Definitely not._ He Loves Us So Much, But He’s So Much Bigger And Loving And More Alien Than Us, it doesn’t always Look Loving. That’s what they’d say. (And where had he heard that line before? Not from Mary, she wasn’t a complete fool, but he was fairly well read about this bollocks.)

He stopped going as frequently. Made the screaming breakdown less likely. And anyway, the group he was with got older, and started mentoring the younger kids and—he couldn’t do that. Not in good faith. 

He was traveling more, anyway.

He stewed every Sunday. Torn between his righteous anger—and the fact he did want that love. Did want to believe. He tried to picture that love, and the promise of Heaven, and pretend the obedience and infinite obligation didn’t come with it. He could still make himself believe—maybe not with his whole self, but a lot of it—but he didn’t know if it counted. Maybe that was what everyone was doing. Maybe he was just being weird. He had no clue

He accidentally took six months off. Thought about trying to make his streak go to a year. But he went. Because he had something he had to ask. Because he had one last gambit for one last ditch attempt to fit in.

He stayed in the service, not going with the rest of the crew and their youngsters in tow. He sung the hymns about Love and Duty and Faith and Being Fishers of Men. Listened to the sermon on the tongues of fire that let one speak all languages, and the power of the holy spirit and the faith it brought. Stayed behind as people lined up to ‘eat, drink, this is my body and blood that I gift to you,’ a gift he was not worthy of because he’d never gotten around to having a first communion. Zoned out during the announcements. Ate precisely the polite amount of biscuits.

And went to talk to Rebecca.

See, Rebecca thought about things. She maybe didn’t say all of them out loud, but he could see that she _thought_ and _cared_. That was one of the reasons he wanted to ask her this. She’d have thought about the answer, would know it and be able to articulate it.

The other—well, he fit in the least, but she fit in the second least. He didn’t know whether there was anything weird or uncanny about her, he doubted that, actually—but she stuck at the edges of the group. Listened more than she spoke when they were just chatting. She was a kindred spirit.

(Okay, half a kindred spirit, but he wasn’t swimming in options.)

They stood out in the garden out the front of the church, away from the knots of people. “Can I chat to you about something?” he asked.

She nodded around her biscuit.

He tried his best not to pace.

“—I haven’t seen you around much,” she said, as it became clear he hadn’t screwed his courage enough to launch into what he wanted to talk about.

“Not the mentoring type.”

“I was a little worried you’d been eaten by sloths.” She smiled at her own joke, but it was forced.

“They haven’t got me yet. Neither have the capybaras.”

“You wanted to talk to me.”

“Yeah. I have—I have a question to ask. Personal one. You don’t have to answer it.”

She nodded.

“Do you—believe? Like, really believe, or do you just _want_ to?”

She looked at him blankly for a second, before launching into a flurry of words. “Of course I believe, I’ve been confirmed and everything, why would I do that if I _didn’t_ —” She wasn’t angry, but surprised and off guard and not knowing where the conversation was going.

“All of it?”

She relaxed, spoke slower, in the way she did when she had the chance to think before she spoke. “Depends on what you mean. If you mean the six thousand years thing—"

“I mean the love.”

“...The love?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

“The infinite love.”

She paused, thinking. “...yeah. I believe in that. That’s _why_ I believe. I feel it. I have to try, but I feel it.”

He nodded, and went to turn away.

“Do you believe?” She asked.

He stopped in his tracks.

“Turnabout is fair play, you know.”

He turned back. “I’m not sure. I want to. But I don’t know if I do.”

“I hope you do. For your sake.”

He smiled lopsidedly, tried to turn it all into a big joke. “Well, I’m not looking forward to the fire and brimstone if I’m wrong.”

“It’s not that. --Or not just that. I hope you get to feel the love.”

“Right. Yeah. Me too.” He turned and left more successfully this time, walking off and just keeping walking until he was nearly the next suburb over.

* * *

Despite the fact that he was very close to being old enough to legally drink, Mary still thought he needed teaching. It had become erratic and less frequent, but every so often she felt that there was something she needed to impart, and would throw an open book of annotated French philosophy or something in front of what he was doing, and ask him to find the ‘real’ meaning.

He sighed, and pulled his sketch book out from under it. Though about it for a second, then closed the sketchbook.

May as well get this over with.

_“..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?...”_

The bottom half of the page was filled with densely packed footnotes, and a tightly fit table of outcomes. Belief and disbelief, God and no God, the infinite rewards of heaven and the eternal damnation of hell, all stuffed into a two by two table.

The top half continued with Pascal’s own words. If there is no way to tell if God exists, then the best bet is to believe, to avoid damnation. And there is no way to avoid putting chips down, not if you were breathing and in this world.

The rest was a polite, open-minded, academic-ese evisceration of the concept. Not that the author would ever describe it like that, of course. Just stating the views of later philosophers, he’d say, being balanced and open-minded and unopinionated and definitely not very mad.

Mary came back, and stood over him, full of expectation.

He knew the answer she wanted. Could give it to her even as his mind churned over the rest of it, tried to work out what _he_ thought about it. He knew her well enough, could track her obsessions and what book of Occult lore or Smirkian taxonomy she was devouring. He could do it in his sleep, if he had to. (And he may as well have been, with the creeping black dread settling in his subconscious like sediment settling in a river, the realisation and revelation coming to him with each pointedly polite sentence of philosophy.) “It’s about rituals. We don’t know if they work, if they could happen. If you try one, and it fails—it’s a lot of wasted effort. But if you succeed, you get infinite reward. Assuming you’re close enough to your patron, of course. Less rewarding if you’re not. And if someone else gets there first—well, that’s pretty bad.”

Mary nodded. “Now how I’d put it, but it’ll do.” Which meant he’d given her exactly the answer she’d wanted, she just wouldn’t admit out loud, because that would mean either admitting other people could be right, or things could be right without being said in the “best” way.

She left to go to the main room, leaving him with the textbook.

The stuff about rituals—he wouldn’t say they didn’t matter, not on the grand scale, but right now he didn’t care. Maybe they were a thing, maybe they weren’t. Leave ‘em to the actual cultists.

But reading this had made him _see_ , made him see what he was doing with awful clarity.

Because he’d bought into the wager. He believed in his fumbling half-hearted way because “Heaven would be nice if it existed.” And that—that was what Pascal said. More eloquently and with more maths, but that _what he said._

And afterwards, people had carefully torn it to shreds.

“Who’s to say that the Christian God is the right one? What if a different God or Gods was the real one—" and while reasoning and evidence weren’t allowed in the wager... he had better evidence that the Entities _existed_. A better bet would be to go be one of those actual cultists and work out how to make the world burn in the most personally ideal way. Not that that was a bet he was going to make—but it was the same bet, just with better odds.

And throwing out using reason and evidence like that. It was sloppy. It was laying the philosophical ground in your favour in a way that just didn’t work in the real world.

He might have still wanted to believe in God. The wager might be nonsense, but if he had to make a bet, ‘heaven would be nice’ had some appeal. But he couldn’t. Not when he’d seen what he was doing. He could try all he wanted, but he’d always know he was just doing it for his own benefit. That he was just doing it because he didn’t want to admit he fooled himself.

He gripped the table hard, knuckles turning white. He just wanted to believe! He wanted to believe, hold onto that hope against hope that even if this life was dog-shit rat-bastardry, at least there was something worthwhile after it. Some glimmer of hope that there was light at the end of the tunnel. That even if this world was fallen and terrible, there was still that love behind it all.

But—he couldn’t. Couldn’t fool himself on purpose like that. No matter how much he wanted to.

(No matter how much he wanted that love.)

He pulled himself away from the table. Considered punching a wall, to feel the pain and catharsis and release of emotions vented physically. Decided against it, because Mary would make him fix it while doing her best to make him feel small and stupid.

He grabbed his coat—leather, more spiky and metallic than was strictly necessary, and went on a walk. He walked as briskly as he could, almost stomping each step, until he got to that one basement metal club with the landlord who couldn’t do maths with birthdates.

And got himself comprehensively smashed.

Getting yourself smashed and screaming along to the most blasphemous music the band played, screaming ‘Hail Satan’ while throwing yourself around wasn’t as good as infinite love, but it was a whole lot more real and available.


	3. an inconvenient truth/lie/???

He didn’t go to church after that. What would be the point? And the more he learned about the entities, the less he was able to believe at all.

(Some in the know said the entities were Satan in his various guises, or the consequence of original sin, or of Cain’s murder of his brother. Gerry did his best not to laugh at them when they said such things. Because yes, an all loving, totally forgiving God would certainly set the entities on the world, or make them as a punishment. Real loving behaviour, that.)

Life didn’t so much ‘go on’ as ‘keep fucking happening.’ He got good at finding Leitners. Better than good. He was top of his field—and realised how pointless it all was. How much of a bad idea it was. But by then, it was too late. He was marked and spotted and there wasn’t much to do other than just keep going and hope one could stay ahead for long enough. He regretted not picking up that Mary was full of shit earlier-- but in his defence he was a child at the time.

And then Mary decided that the best way not to die was to already be dead. And then there was the murder trial, and then—

He smoked more. Idly wondered how long it would take his lungs to get riddled with cancer, was torn between hoping it was ‘never’ or ‘soon.’ He occasionally craved church services, the way one would crave a hit of nicotine. They held that same promise of relief, of comfort, and church peddled the possibility of community. But cigarettes didn’t lie about their claims. They’d kill you, but at least you’d feel good while you were doing it. Church’d chew you up and spit you out with a smile and make you feel more alienated than before, and it’d be your fault for going to the service of a religion you didn’t actually believe.

He might want an all loving, benevolent God to exist now, now that he knew more, now that he was having to deal with more—but it also meant he was less able to. He could be nostalgic for belief, but actual, real belief? Not going to happen.

He had limited skills, and Mary was still in the book trade, and so he just kept doing what he was doing. Kept going down that path, kept going deeper and deeper, getting more and more supernatural attention directed his way. He’d been marked and noticed, and he could feel it burning into him, feel the precious seconds of his life before he got consumed whole tick away (and was intimately aware that noticing that was not helping his situation).

The safest thing was to never get any of their attentions. The next safest thing was to make sure something had a vested interest in you being alive and whole.

None of the options were good. He calculated the pros and cons, worked out what he could live with, until he was left with one least worst choice.

The Beholding was a bad choice of a patron. Objectively. By all bench marks, if the Beholding was your best choice, you were screwed. ...but you can’t watch or be watched when you’re _dead_. And while it would probably be angry at his book burning (as much as eldritch fear entities beyond the mortal realms could be ‘angry’), it’d at least like the obsessive research it involved.

He researched the best way to tie himself to it, the one that gave the best pay off between freedom and protection.

He did his research, mundane this time. Found the one tattoo shop that fell in the intersection of ‘would tattoo a first timer on their joints’ and ‘won’t give said first timer something exciting and bloodborne’.

And he went to go make his marks visible.

Leaving the tattoo shop, he felt sore, itchy and strange. He’d made a promise, he realised. Inking himself with the mark of an idol, turning his back on God in a permanent way. (As much as that was a thing you could actually do to an all-loving, all-forgiving thing.) It wasn’t what he intended, and it didn’t even matter because God wasn’t real—but it was what he’d done.

And that didn’t mean the little shrivelled part of him that wanted Him to exist didn’t notice.

He’d never managed to get baptised, or have his first communion, let alone be confirmed. But he did manage to mark himself for the Ceaseless Watcher.

* * *

There were a lot of ways to find Leitners. Estate sales, connections with people in the know, following a trail of weird bullshit till you find something—and anonymous cries for help on the internet.

This person was evidently having a very bad time of it. A time that was not helped by the fact that every plea for advice or assistance was meet with painfully diplomatic replies of “Have you considered Getting Help™? It’s Very Helpful.” And no one had spotted the fact that all this trouble had started when she’d bought an antique book, a fact that she was desperately trying to explain and make clear to people who’d already written her off.

He could almost feel the relief through the screen when he offered to appraise the book for her, see what was up.

“Don’t worry, it’s my specialty,” he typed. “What’s your address?”

She lived in a reasonable apartment around the edge of London. Small, but not a complete cupboard. It was furnished decently enough, with first hand Ikea tables and second-hand chairs.

But there were flickers of oddness. Most things were in reasonable places – knives hanging up on boards in the kitchen, a coat rack in the entrance. But others, less so. An iron hid behind one of the coats. The knives were joined by a toilet brush. A couch cushion sat on the kitchen island next a cutting board.

The walls were covered with art, of impossible still lives, of flowers that did not come in such fluorescent colours, orbited by floating glass marbles. All the signatures were the same. Either she was a collector, or these were her own.

Dark circles sat under her eyes, and there was a greasy sheen to her hair, and she had the air of someone whose life had been falling apart for just long enough that they were starting to fall apart too. “Thank you so much for coming, for believing me, I don’t know what’s going on at all but I know it’s the book.”

“Let me take a look at it, and I’ll see what the problem is.”

She handed him a couch cushion, tried to thrust it into his hands.

“That—that isn’t a book.” A fabric covered hardback—1920s or 30s, if he had to guess without looking at the front pages—sat on the table. He picked it up. “Is this it?”

She looked to it, and then at the couch cushion, and then back to it. She shrugged. “It must be. I guess.”

Which wasn’t a comforting answer, but he could roll with it.

He opened the book to the front cover. There was a square of glue where a book plate would have been, but it could be ‘from the Library of Greater Surrey’ instead of who he wanted it to be from.

“I just wanted to know about representational art! And realism! And I do but and I did and the book had it—but not how I wanted it.”

He made what was, in hindsight, a stupid error. He had done this multiple times in the past, and it had only occasionally bit him in the ass. And this time could arguably count as one of those times. But it was also, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, a risk he shouldn’t have taken this time. (Unlike all those other times he did the exact same thing and nothing went wrong, which in hindsight meant he had made objectively correct and sensible decisions.)

He flipped the book to a random page, and started to read.

_“But representation is not the object, and can never be the object, but instead a flat projection of three-dimensional reality onto a crude replica of canvas or film. A painting is a lie, the real obscured by human interpretation. But equally the human eye turns the waves of light bouncing off a surface into an interpretation of a three-dimensional reality. Is that not as much a false representation as the painting? Or is it more false, because while most can agree that a painting no matter how hard it tries, is not the object, most believe the illusions of their senses. To view a painting is to view reality twice distorted from itself, the mind turning a camera obscura view into something vivid and viewing the vivid double-falsehood as if it was single-real—”_

He should have stopped, at that point. He could feel his mind chewing over it in a way it shouldn’t, not if he was idly flicking through a normal book. He was struck by an awareness that the words he saw in neat black type were not what he actually saw. A reflective surface partially covered in a less reflective media, that his brain automatically turned into words and meaning despite the fact that it really wasn’t. It was random dark marks on light surface, and even that was interpretation, his brain not allowing him the truth of the waves coming to his eyes without backfilling in details and interpretation. And words? What were words? The thought forms of waves in the air that people insisted had meaning and that they heard completely and correctly.

“ _Man can never see the Real. Can never hear, nor touch, nor taste the Real. Everything is churned through a layer of expectation and interpretation and ‘understanding’ and ultimately falsehood. Nothing can be really seen, and thus nothing can be understood as it actually is. We are all babbling at Babel, believing ourselves to have tongues of fire as we show our false world through the medium of our art, that double and triple and infinite falsehood over the single-real_ _...”_

He tore his eyes aware from the page, and looked back up at her.

She was staring at him, and he could recognise that expression, could feel a kinship with what she was feeling. _Is this real? Am I looking at a person? Or is my brain just filling a person in where there is none?_

Of course, that assumed he was interpreting her expression right. Which. Well.

The whole room took on a sinister edge. Yes, it looked like a somewhat cluttered apartment with paintings on the walls and an iron on the coat rack. He recognised everything in it. But could he be sure he recognised it? Was that actually a table, or something that rode along with the book, that carefully presented the image of a table until the right time? It didn’t seem likely—but that was because his brain thought it was unlikely. And what made him think his brain would be right?

And with each revolution of uncertainty, the less he recognised. Could he really be sure he was standing on vinyl floor? The sensory input split and magnified, his brain rushing to analysing everything at once and completely failing to, everything he saw and heard and felt feeling like what saying a word too many times and it losing its meaning. _Vinyl vinyl vinyl vinyl_.

It took an act of will to close the book. Would closing it really help? The information was already inside his brain, and anyway, who was to say the covers were actually opaque and would actually hide that knowledge? Who was to say he was holding a book, and not something else? Something dangerous. (...More dangerous.)

But he’d had practice operating like this. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least he could fake functional. “How much?” he asked, not confident in the existence, value, or use of money.

She looked at him equally adrift. “An amount?” 

He reached into his wallet, and pulled out some money. “This much?” (By later accounting, he gave her £105, a grocery receipt, and a loyalty card for the café three blocks away from Pinhole Books. It was a steal as Leitners went, but set him back five coffees toward his next free one.)

“Sure.”

He left, book in hand, and tried very hard not to run.

He knew how this worked. You just had to be the right amount of scared. Not so scared that you couldn’t function, and not so calm that anything nearby thought it wasn’t trying hard enough. And then you just had to get somewhere safe.

He just had to get back home, check if Mary was around, and either hand it to her or set it alight, as applicable.

The plan seemed much more slippery as he picked his way down the stairs, worried that each step held a gaping maw or a void it was trying to hide from him.

His heart beat rabbit quick. _This isn’t so bad,_ he thought to himself, in a bid to convince himself. _I’ve had worse._ Of course, that’s what he wanted to think, and thus was probably wrong.

Something whispered past his ear.

Someone coming up the stairs looked at him with... an expression? Faces weren’t usually hard, but right now he was too focused on whether they actually existed or not or were a false layer of reality to do things more complicated than ‘that’s a nose!’

He must have spoken out loud then. But he hadn’t understood himself. That seemed—unideal. Or maybe completely correct. Sound and speech were meaningless; why would he understand them?

He tried to give the person a friendly smile.

Their expression changed, and he still couldn’t read it.

He hurried down the stairs. He just had to get home, and then he could deal with this.

He landed heavily and stumbled, trying to go down an extra step that wasn’t there. In hindsight, this was very mundane, but right now it was filled with fell meaning, proof that his senses were lying to him.

He kept going, the distrust and semantic satiation of his senses getting worse and worse. What was the ground made of? Could he trust it? Why should he trust it? He kept bumping into things he didn’t have the focus to spot, some soft and yielding and stepping back and some hard and rocky.

He stepped down a drop onto darker ground. Something stopped next to him, and made a noise, harsh and strident and loud, but he couldn’t process it.

He couldn’t trust anything. Everything was full of lurking danger he couldn’t see—or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe everything was as safe as it looked, but he couldn’t _trust_ that.

He didn’t walk home. Partially because he couldn’t follow the route, and partially because some part of him knew he couldn’t show up on Mary’s door step like this. Home was safer. Home wasn’t safe.

He just kept going, fear building and building. He had to find somewhere actually safe. Somewhere he could trust. And he knew that such a place didn’t exist, not right now, not while he was like this, but he had to _find it_.

He found a door. Wooden, rough and warm It felt like it had a spotlight over it, a metaphorical shimmer over it. _In here. Here is comfortable. Comforting. Come in._

If he was more with it, he wouldn’t trust it. Nothing that wanted to lure you like that had good intentions. But right now, it filled him with such a relief that he didn’t even think of the dangers as he picked its lock. Comfort, if not safety, was behind it, and he needed that. Needed to sit down and breathe and take stock, and some part of him knew (hoped?) that if he just sat for a bit, this would pass.

He walked in and... recognised it. Properly recognised and understood it. As an actual space with things in it, not a useless sensory jumble. He nearly collapsed to the floor with relief at _recognising_ and _understanding_ something.

It was the church he used to go to. Dark, and with the morning tea tables folded and stacked up against the wall, but still the place he knew. He shouldn’t be here; he broke in but—no harm done. Well, no harm to anything except the lock. He could collect himself here. Collect himself, calm down, and head back home.

He put himself in the pew at the back corner. For old time’s sake. They’d re-upholstered the kneeling cushions—but it still smelled the same. Burnt wax and wine and wood polish. He collapsed against the pew, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. Everything was still too much. There could still be something lurking in the infrared, past where he could see. The pew could still be something deadly. But right now, he was just going to sit and wait and hope that this would pass.

His heart rate slowed by degrees. Infinitesimal, frustrating, but still extant degrees, and it settled in his ribcage and stopped trying to break its way out. His lungs followed, going from panicked hyperventilation to too fast but kind of reasonable.

A breeze went over him. A warm one. Might have been a draft, except for the fact it was getting dark outside and it was autumn. Maybe he was under a heating vent. Yeah, that was it, just a heating vent he’d never noticed, that was on for some reason when no one was there.

He lifted his head, and looked behind him.

There was no vent.

The breeze came again. It was... nice? Nice in a way that was both hard to articulate, and hard to attribute to a breeze. It was comforting. Like a hug, or a gentle hand on one’s shoulder. Even if it was just the movement of air, he could feel the meaning it was trying to be.

He stood up, and tried to its source, in the vain hope that it had a physical cause.

The whole room seemed to be filled with that comforting warmth, and an almost palpable sense of love and safety and relief. _It’s okay, it will be okay, you are wonderfully and fearfully made—_

He felt a stab of fear. That was an emotional hijacking, that was a _classic_ emotion hijacking, and those never ended anywhere good. Always ended up with you in deeper and worse off.

But the fear was quickly smothered by that comfort, like a candle smothered by a candle snuffer. That fear was nothing the face of the sense of safety and love that surrounded him, and that built and built with no obvious cause. It was not simple safety, not a promise of ‘you’ll be fine right now’. It was a sense that even if things were not good or safe or comfortable now, that they ultimately would be, that there was something that loved him completely and wholeheartedly watching over him, even if stormy seas and a thousand miles and the end of a world stood between him and It.

He stumbled towards the altar, where the people who actually managed to have a first communion took it.

The cross loomed over him. Plain unadorned wood took on a power beyond its mere physical form in that dark, resurrection and redemption running through the lignin like lightning. That sense of love grew until it was overwhelming, the heat becoming like redemptive and cleansing fire. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

It was unbearable.

_I love you too._

Light came through the stained glass despite the dark outside, shining in bright golds and reds and pinks and oranges. He remembered the priest telling him it was for Pentecost, a tongue of fire that lined up with the cross at the right times of year.

The light slid down till it rested over him, lighting him up with that warm rainbow, each broken triangle of light imbuing where-ever it landed with a clarity of sensation and.

The breeze became a warm wind, whipping his hair, like an open furnace heated seven times hotter blowing over him.

He fell to his knees. He didn’t have the strength or the spare attention to remain standing. He scrunched his eyes, clasped his hands... and prayed. What else was he to do? It was a wordless, wild thing. Pleas for mercy and deliverance and hope, in a whirl of emotion that could not become sound, let alone language.

It shattered—the whole everything, the emotion and the atmosphere and the light raining down on him—like glass at the sound of a door opening and footsteps coming towards him.

He opened his eyes and looked up.

It was Stephen, the younger pastor. Though he imagined Mr Smith had probably retired by now, and a new priest sent, making Stephen the older one now.

Gerard didn’t know what his expression was before he saw him. Anxiety at the possibility the noise he heard was a burglar, confusion, or something else?

But right now, he had a tense smile. “Oh, Gerard! Long time no see!” (That smile was almost nostalgic in and of itself. Stephen had always tried to Smiley and Affably Relatable around him, and it always covered a feeling of ‘Is this kid in a cult? An orphan? Is he a cult orphan, and what do I do with that?’ The expression he had now was remarkably similar.) 

“I had to come in to—check something,” he said. It was an incredibly bad lie, but he hadn’t had time to prepare. ‘I came in to pray’ would have been better (and, unintentionally, accurate.)

Stephen looked him up and down, seeming to check to make sure he hadn’t stolen anything. “Rough night?”

Gerard realised he’d been crying. He rubbed his face to get rid of his tears, but mostly managed just to make his eyes redder. “You could say that, yeah.”

Stephen came closer, and made moves to try and gently shuffle him out the door with touching him.

Gerard acquiesced.

“Maybe come in on Sunday. Might do you some good. We even have some adult confirmation classes coming up soon.”

Gerard nodded, and headed towards the door. He opened it, and was about to leave, when he paused. He didn’t know what had happened back there. He’d have to think about it, and he hadn’t had the time yet. Maybe it was God! That’d be nice.

But that wasn’t _plausible_.

“Be careful,” he said, doing his due diligence.

Stephen smiled brighter, and the hidden concern became more obvious. “I’ll do my best!”

Good enough. Gerard walked out into the night. His head was clearing. He felt confident he could at least pretend the pavement was probably pavement, and that’d do. But clarity didn’t mean understanding.

He dropped the Leitner off at Pinhole, and swept out the door before Mary couldn’t say anything about it. It had been a night of revelations. ...possible revelations. Things that may or may not have been revelations, or just his brain making dumb mistakes, or supernatural stuff.

...it had been a night of unclear bullshit, anyway.

Getting drunk didn’t clear anything up, but it did makes things more pleasantly fuzzy.

* * *

He woke up, head pounding from a dehydration headache, teeth sticky, and with an annoyingly clear memory of last night. Not perfectly clear. There was a fuzziness about it, of something being translated to the wrong format, intense emotional experience stored as words that couldn’t quite fit it.

But he remembered it.

Which implied that on some level _it happened_.

The Leitner whammy was self-inflicted and sensical. He could understand it.

What happened after—well.

It could have been a continued whammy, filtered through his perception of churches, twisting it to suit its own ends. Or it could have been something else, that spotted him in a moment of weakness and decided to pick him off. Something that decided to carefully put a rug underneath him so it could pull it out later, except for the fact it got interrupted.

Or it could have been God.

That was always a possibility.

He dragged himself out of bed, and shuffled towards the kitchen.

It didn’t seem likely it was God. This was the first ‘evidence’ he’d seen, and it could equally be explained by ‘the Spiral hates me’, something he knew for a fact, so by Occam’s Razor—probably not Our Lord and Saviour doing him a solid.

But with that same logic, the rapture could come and he’d be able to say ‘Well, this is an unusual End apocalypse.’

He chucked Pedialyte into a water and chugged it. It didn’t taste like death! So, yeah, definitely over did it last night. He’d say ‘woops’, but he felt too justified about that decision. But it also meant he could declare himself far too dehydrated for this nonsense.

He looked up to see Mary reading from the book. “Thank you, Gerard,” she said distractedly, as she flipped through with no ill effects.

He glared ineffectually at her for a second, before dragging the Pedialyte and his stupid body back to bed to go back to sleep.

* * *

Time didn’t explain it. He never really had enough time free to think about it, and it wasn’t amenable to thinking. It was an inexplicable thing that happened to him, that maybe he’d understand later, but right now was one of Life’s Little Mysteries™.

He didn’t get eaten by anything, which implied it probably wasn’t a set up. Another tally mark to put in the ‘maybe it was God?’ column.

But equally, every so often the world would dissolve into its illusion, concrete and park benches becoming disconnected sensory data as he felt that disembodied stab of fear, and afterwards felt like death warmed over. Which, well, pointed to something trying to get him. Maybe. Or the reading the Leitner having after effects. It wouldn’t be the first or last time Leitner hunting had left him with a ‘present.’

So. No clarity on that yet.

But he had time.

* * *

Gerry and Gertrude drove into a Pennsylvania town on a Saturday night. It was just large enough to feature:

  * A motel, with a tired clerk who did not even care about the ‘we are a mother and son, on a rural road trip’ charade
  * A Presbyterian church
  * An Episcopalian church across the road from the Presbyterian one, which leant both the church’s changeable signs an air of passive aggression.



He hadn’t been to a church in a while. Not since the incident. Hadn’t seen the need to. But a man’s allowed to indulge in nostalgia occasionally. It’s healthy! Probably. And it would be a distraction from the Migraines(?) of Doom that had been following him around.

(And some part of him hoped that the next time he went into, there would be a Sign. If he thought about it, he didn’t actually _believe_ there would be a Sign—but he stupidly hoped for it, nonetheless.)

He woke up the next morning, well before Gertrude (who, despite her many competencies, was neither much of a morning person nor good with jet lag.) His head hurt, but it hurt all the time, and if he didn’t do anything while he was like that, he’d never _do_ anything. He dragged himself out of bed and dressed himself in the best approximation of Sunday best that he had packed. A white button up shirt, that he packed so Gertrude couldn’t claim he hadn’t brought any respectable clothes, and black jeans that weren’t covered in any unnecessary metal. “Well, I’m off to church. Give you an excuse to hit the road later.”

Gertrude looked up from the milk carton she was staring at like it contained the secrets of the universe. “I didn’t know you were religious,” she said, doubting the idea that she might not know something about him.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said, carefully dodging the question.

He walked over to the church, like someone who didn’t have a section of his brain rise up against the tyranny of the skull that contained it and was trying to undermine it with picks and hammers.

It was a small church, for a small-ish town, and about a third to half of the people were old enough to be grandparents, with a contingent of families with children making up the rest.

The old man handing out the pamphlets smiled. “Ah! A visitor!” he said, with tone of someone not saying the subtext “someone who hasn’t heard all my stories yet!”

He did his best impression of smiling back.

He made his way to the back pew, and stuck himself in the corner, for old time’s sake.

The words were different, and the hymns too—but it was similar enough for his mouth to fall around the places where they were familiar, and the underlying structure was the same enough.

There was a warm nostalgia, and a sense of ‘you go, you funky kids,’ when the youth group shuffled out, small knots of teenagers with their heads bent together talking as the sermon started.

His head hurt, but he could almost pretend it didn’t, as the priest spoke of infinite love and sacrifice and the forgiveness that went with it.

It didn’t matter if he believed it or not. It was nice to hear, regardless. Nice to step into a world where people believed it, even if he couldn’t. Somewhere that didn’t sound like complete bullshit that people made up to sleep better at night, where there was someone who’d always love you no matter what.

He stayed back from the communion. But he stayed there for the morning tea. The biscuits were different, oreos and store brand whoopie pies instead of the jaffa cakes and wagon wheels. But they were still tasty.

An old woman came up, torn between crotchet-y judginess and an extroverted desire to socialise. “You’re new.”

“Just passing through. Didn’t want to miss a service. It was a nice one.” Not revelatory or world-changing or even uplifting, but nice. Nice could be enough. He’d take nice

“Hmm. Too much new music.”

“Fair enough,” he said, nibbling at an oreo. “I wouldn’t know.”

He left, feeling something that resembled better (even if the ideal would be to collapse on a bed in a dark room with the promise that there was nothing he actually needed to do.)

Gertrude waited on the concrete porch of the motel room, reading the biography of someone or other who had lost their eyes in a tragic exacto knife accident.

“You know there’s not much point doing that when I’m around, right?” he said, gesturing over his whole tattooed self.

“It pays to be careful. And not to break good habits.” She crisply put her bookmark in and shut the book with what would have been a slam if it wasn’t a paperback. “Feeling uplifted and ready to face the day?” she asked, somewhat sarcastically.

He shrugged, and got in the passenger seat. Uplifted? No. Uplifting would have required something a little more personal than the mere existence of church services. But better? Eh, that was accurate enough. Though now he felt like a puppet with its strings cut, a combination cinder block and woodpecker head, and mild regret that he had decided to push the boat out by standing up and sitting down repeatedly while singing.

“We’re close to where we need to get to. We won’t need to drive all day,” Gertrude said.

He resisted the temptation to say _that obvious, huh?_

“Next stop, Pittsburgh,” he said with a lack of enthusiasm that he hoped sounded deliberate and sarcastic, rather than what it actually was. “And its totally normal archive.” He waved half-hearted jazz hands.

“It won’t be much help if it is,” she said primly, and started the car.


End file.
